The concepts themselves are dizzying: LDA, co-occurrence, and entity salience, to name only a few. The question is
"How can I easily incorporate these techniques into my content for higher rankings?"

In fact, you can create optimized pages without understanding complex algorithms. Sites like Wikipedia, IMDB, and Amazon create highly optimized, topic-focused pages almost by default. Utilizing these best practices works exactly the same when you're creating your own content.

The purpose of this post is to provide a simple
framework for on-page topic targeting in a way that makes optimizing easy and scalable while producing richer content for your audience.

1. Keywords and relationships

No matter what topic modeling technique you choose, all rely on discovering
relationships between words and phrases. As content creators, how we organize words on a page greatly influences how search engines determine the on-page topics.

When we use keywords phrases, search engines hunt for other phrases and concepts that
relate to one another. So our first job is to expand our keywords research to incorporate these related phrases and concepts. Contextually rich content includes:

Close variants and synonyms: Includes abbreviations, plurals, and phrases that mean the same thing.

Primary related keywords: Words and phrases that relate to the main keyword phrase.

Secondary related keywords: Words and phrases that relate to the primary related keywords.

Entity relationships: Concept that describe the properties and relationships between people, places, and things.

A good keyword phrase or entity is one that
predicts the presence of other phrases and entities on the page. For example, a page about "The White House" predicts other phrases like "president," "Washington," and "Secret Service." Incorporating these related phrases may help strengthen the topicality of "White House."

2. Position, frequency, and distance

How a page is organized can greatly influence how concepts relate to each other.

Once search engines find your keywords on a page, they need to determine which ones are most
important, and which ones actually have the strongest relationships to one another.

Three primary techniques for communicating this include:

Position: Keywords placed in important areas like titles, headlines, and higher up in the main body text may carry the most weight.

Frequency: Using techniques like TF-IDF, search engines determine important phrases by calculating how often they appear in a document compared to a normal distribution.

Distance: Words and phrases that relate to each other are often found close together, or grouped by HTML elements. This means leveraging semantic distance to place related concepts close to one another using paragraphs, lists, and content sectioning.

A great way to organize your on-page content is to employ your
primary and secondary related keywords in support of your focus keyword. Each primary related phrase becomes its own subsection, with the secondary related phrases supporting the primary, as illustrated here.

As an example, the primary keyword phrase of this page is
'On-page Topic Targeting'. Supporting topics include:keywords and relationships, on-page optimization, links, entities, and keyword tools. Each related phrase supports the primary topic, and each becomes its own subsection.

3. Links and supplemental content

Many webmasters overlook the importance of linking as a topic signal.

Several well-known Google
search patents and early researchpapers describe analyzing a page's links as a way to determine topic relevancy. These include both internal links to your own pages and external links to other sites, often with relevant anchor text.

Google's own
Quality Rater Guidelines cites the value external references to other sites. It also describes a page's supplemental content, which can includes internal links to other sections of your site, as a valuable resource.

If you need an example of how relevant linking can help your SEO,
The New York Timesfamously saw success, and an increase in traffic, when it started linking out to other sites from its topic pages.

Although this guide discusses
on-page topic optimization, topical external links with relevant anchor text can greatly influence how search engines determine what a page is about. These external signals often carry more weight than on-page cues, but it almost always works best when on-page and off-page signals are in alignment.

4. Entities and semantic markup

Google extracts entities from your webpage automatically,
without any effort on your part. These are people, places and things that have distinct properties and relationships with each other.

Even though entity extraction happens automatically, it's often essential to mark up your content with
Schema for specific supported entities such as business information, reviews, and products. While the ranking benefit of adding Schema isn't 100% clear, structured data has the advantage of enhanced search results.

5. Crafting the on-page framework

You don't need to be a search genius or spend hours on complex research to produce high quality, topic optimized content. The beauty of this framework is that it can be used by anyone, from librarians to hobby bloggers to small business owners; even when they aren't search engine experts.

A good webpage has much in common with a high quality university paper. This includes:

A strong title that communicates the topic

Introductory opening that lays out what the page is about

Content organized into thematic subsections

Exploration of multiple aspects of the topic and answers related questions

Provision of additional resources and external citations

Your webpage doesn't need to be academic, stuffy, or boring. Some of the most interesting pages on the Internet employ these same techniques while remaining dynamic and entertaining.

Keep in mind that 'best practices' don’t apply to every situation, and as
Rand Fishkin says"There's no such thing as 'perfectly optimized' or 'perfect on-page SEO.'" Pulling everything together looks something like this:

5 alternative tools for related keyword and entity research

One of the few tools on the market that delivers entity extraction, concept targeting and linked data analysis. This is a great platform for understanding how a modern search engine views your webpage.

You brought up a concept I frequently use with clients: "A good webpage has much in common with a high quality university paper." While you put it a little more eloquently, I often have clients/copywriters think of Google as a college professor that will be grading (ranking) your term paper on a curve. Research, analysis, brainstorming, nailing down a thesis (topic), creating an outline (or content wireframe/structure), determining titles/subtitles (H1/2/3), then writing intro/body/concluding paragraphs, using proper grammar, citing your sources, providing helpful/relevant visuals... To me, the preparation & process of creating a quality term paper is the same as creating a user- and search-friendly, well optimized page.

Happy to see I'm not the only one thinking about/simplifying on-page SEO in this way! :)

I am doing seo of my office website. I use rel canonical for http to https redirection. It has some issue after this. My https://www.akclinics.com don't get ranked on serp. After doing a lots of good work. What is the main reason behind this. Kindly help me out.I am in big pressure by boss.

I am especially very happy to see you are suggesting Google Trends, because is a much less used "suggestion" tool, as people usually refer to Google Suggest and Google Related Searches.

About Google Related Searches, one thing that everybody can do is to

Perform a search;

Go seeing the Related Searches;

Open in new tabs each one of them;

Record the Related Searches of those new opened SERPs

Repeat as many times he wants.

This very simple research helps understanding how Google links one search topic to another, and it can help us understanding the topical landscape related to our first search.

Another nice thing to do is - if our query returned a classic Knowledge Graph box on the rights side of the SERPs - looking at what other "Entities" people searched apart the one shown in the present KG Box. Those could be defined as "Related Entities", which not necessarily are directly connected to the one presented, but usually lie in a sort of six degrees of separation from it.

That analysis helps us understanding how people relates Entities (people, brands, things...) between them.

Indeed I remember that deck. Slide 51 is very true. Although some great tools are starting to incorporate that process (like LinkResearchTools for instance), identifying the intent behind keywords is something that still have to (and should) be done manually in my opinion.

If you've got old Google analytics data (from before they started "not provided"), it's worth importing the search terms into a spreadsheet and performing analysis. It's surprising the related keywords people used to find you, and with a few tweaks, you can optimise your page for better visibility for those terms.

Obviously this tip only works for those who have old websites and hence have accrued a lot of data in analytics.

This is a great tip Matilda...I've used this a bunch of times in the real world. I find myself optimizing toward what a product can do and use cases for the items vs a item's description. There is a lot more interest in how and why then the what.

Thanks Cyrus for informative guide! Most of points you have mentioned in this post I have checked out before. However, I am not sure that it's enough to get ranking with search engine. However, your guide is really informative and helpful! thanks again!

I would resist using keyword clouds at the bottom of every page. Sometimes these can work to a limited degree if you use them for contextual linking, but it can come off as spammy, lead to keyword stuffing actions and could hurt your rankings.

Hi Cyrus Great Info on on page and keyword suggestions, This is going to be the future and is the next level game for modern SEO, Also the on page SEO is now not only confined to Title, Description and Keyword density but Google is now also seeing second level symmetrical terms which can raise direct signals to search engine.Thanks

Great article Cyrus. I'm especially intrigued by the linking section. Had this same question about whether it is OK to constantly link out to other relevant pages on the web. I know it is dramatically going to improve user experience, but so far I feared that on the flipside I'm going to lose rankings by continually doing this strategy. Wanted to create some interesting mash-up articles but this dilemma has always held me back.

The Whiteboard Friday video from five years ago really convinced me otherwise. So thanks for including that in your article.

Just a question- would it be better to try and create more relevant pages within my own site (although being time consuming) and link to them, instead of simply pointing the link to other relevant and quality resources on the web?

There seems to be value in linking to both external and internal resources, and on balance I believe you should try to do both.

There is the issue of keyword cannibalization, so I try to watch my anchor text when linking to external sources (and not use the exact match of the page I'm trying to rank). Google is getting better at analyzing anchor text signals but it's still such a strong indicator of relevancy/importance that you want to handle it with care.

Rand's post provides a much broader view of on-page SEO and incorporates many other ranking and usability factors that improve a page's overall chance of succeeding. Hopefully both are valuable in their own way.

Couldn't believe it, apparently I only have seen the image of Rand's post, I never read the whole thing.

Why don't you merge this article with your article you wrote earlier? There was a lot of valuable information in this article, which is a great extension on your previous "More than Keywords: 7 Concepts of Advanced On-Page SEO".

Thanks again, was waiting for this article for a long time. 'Blogpost of the month' - worthy.

Excellent post, Cyrus! Improving topical authority and semantic relevance within a website can be achieved by a comprehensive analysis of the existing posts and then finding opportunities where they can be linked to each other based on topical relevance. Fore example, if I have a 5-year old blog having over 2000 posts, I can analyse the old posts and see if there are any opportunities for me to link to other posts. This can be a time consuming process but this can definitely improve the topical authority within a website.

Exceptional article. Just look at the infographic anyone can identify clearly how to establish proper extrategia keywords. Definitely one of the best informational resources I've found. Thank you very much for the input.

Great one Cyrus, you always seem to do a great job at making me feel stupid. :) Thanks for the breakdown on entity and schema relationship. That's actually super helpful for me on a process we've been testing.

Thanks for the article. I'm really liking this more 'relational' approach.

Using this method, what would your approach be for a company that deals in two major market sectors instead of one. Often (like in this article) SEO examples focus on a well-defined topic (like "White House" or "used cars"). But what about a case in which, for example, the company is involved in both pest control and odor removal. For the home page, would you try to still focus on a single keyword phrase (and close variants and synonyms) that would be general enough to encompass both? Or in this case would it work to apply this method to two main keywords on a single page? Although this article (and others) would suggest the first, it often feels that in cases like this where there are two or more topics that are not closely related it's hard to find a single keyword phrase that would generate traffic with the right intent. Would you still try to focus on a single keyword phrase for the homepage that encompasses both topics (like 'environment restoration') vs two phrases (for example 'pest control' and 'odor removal') knowing that it will probably not rank height against competitors, and focus on the single keywords 'pest control' and 'odor removal' on the secondary pages?

Another brilliant post once again, Cyrus. Do you or does anyone else know if there's an API version of a keyword suggestion generator? SEO Review Tools' Keyword Suggestion Tool is really useful, but I have to enter everything in manually. It would be good if I could query something to automate the process for me and spit out a list in an easy to manipulate format. Naturally a free tool would be preferable. :-) It's a long shot, but if anyone knows anything, please let me know. Thanks, Paul

Thanks for the post Cyrus - I would say most of what you have posted makes sense. Any advice on what to do when you are working with a client that doesn't provide the most optimize content? I'm specifically thinking of e-commerce website where there seems to be less words and more images. I understand you can optimize the images and all that but I have found it to be a difficult balance.

Keep in mind the goal of the secondary related keywords is not search volumne (although it certain helps to capture long-tail traffic, sometimes amazingly so!) - but the primary purpose is to provide contextual relevance to your principal keyword phrase. You're basically telling the search engine "look, here's my primary topic and all this other context supports it, so you can be sure my primary topic is what I say it is"

Awesome Post as always :) Finally I am able to find a good latest post on on page seo. The good thing is that on page is still about keywords and relevant phrases. Also the tools you mentioned at the end of the post looks awesome. It time to play with these tools. :)

Haven't tried alchemy yet, but judging by some of the comments, and of course the fact that you mentioned it in your article, it's something I'm looking forward to trying. Just trying to improve a little bit at a time :) This post was incredibly thorough. I'm equally impressed and grateful you've taken the time to put all this information in such a compact and easy to understand article.

The tools which are given are worth to use. And in On page i would like to give my votes to Keyword and its relationship. You have to give weightage to secondary keywords as well compare to primary keywords. Also the supplemental content should have to be unique and appealing. If everything goes well according to this plan, you will surely get success.

Really great article. We're revamping a lot of our content and this has been very useful. I had a question about the use of heading tags (H1, H2, etc.). Shouldn't they be hierarchical, where the title of your page is an H1 ,which will include your primary keyword, then subsequent headings would move down, so the second heading would be an H2, third an H3... I notice in this article, all the headings, including the title of the article, is an H2. Is there a reason for this and is there a best practice to follow?

A clear definition on #seo and the #seo strategies. It is in a trend to share the consequences of the professionals and get rectified with the discussion which is quite appreciative.Especially, it is quite common with the #seo professionals.

Hi there! The blog comments aren't really the right spot to ask for help with your websites -- we try to keep them relevant to what the author discussed and valuable for the rest of the readers. Thanks for joining the conversation!